Aesthetic Labour: Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism (original) (raw)
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Chinese Sociological Review
Prior research suggests that gendered norms of appearance are particularly demanding in East Asian societies, including Taiwan. However, it remains unclear how the factor of temporality is related to women's beautification. Relying on 62 in-depth interviews with Taiwanese women, we explore women's mobilization of feminine appearance as an important aspirational strategy to gain various advantages and some women's resistance to those bodily norms in Taiwan's neoliberal context. The findings reveal that, in both cases, women's attitude toward the future is determinant. The apprehension of appearance in the future could be illustrated by women's concern for aging well, their meticulous preparation for maternity, and mothers' investment in their daughters' beauty practices. Paradoxically neoliberalism's future-oriented temporality could result in a resistant attitude toward female beauty, since endless bodily work might lead to a withdrawal from the constant investment in female appearance.
Keeping up appearances: aesthetic labour in the fashion modelling industries of London and New York
Sociological Review, 2006
This paper addresses itself to literature on 'aesthetic labour' in order to extend understanding of embodied labour practices. Through a case study of fashion modelling in New York and London we argue for an extension of the concept to address what we see as problematic absences and limitations. Thus, we seek to extend its range, both in terms of occupations it can be applied to, not just interactive service work and organizational workers, and its conceptual scope, beyond the current concern with superficial appearances at work and within organizations. First, we attend to the ways in which these freelancers have to adapt to fluctuating aesthetic trends and different clients and commodify themselves in the absence of a corporate aesthetic. The successful models are usually the ones who take on the responsibility of managing their bodies, becoming 'enterprising' with respect to all aspects of their embodied self. Secondly, unlike Dean (2005) who similarly extends aesthetic labour to female actors, we see conceptual problems with the term that need addressing. We argue that the main proponents of aesthetic labour have a poorly conceived notion of embodiment and that current conceptualizations produce a reductive account of the aesthetic labourer as a 'cardboard cut-out', and aesthetic labour as superficial work on the body's surface. In contrast, drawing on phenomenology, we examine how aesthetic labour involves the entire embodied self, or 'body/self', and analyse how the effort to keep up appearances, while physical, has an emotional content to it. Besides the physical and emotional effort of body maintenance, the imperative to project 'personality' requires many of the skills in emotional labour described by . Thirdly, aesthetic labour entails on-going production of the body/self, not merely a superficial performance at work. The enduring nature of this labour is evidenced by the degree of body maintenance required to conform to the fashion model aesthetic (dieting, for example) and is heightened by the emphasis placed on social networking in freelancing labour, which demands workers who are 'always on'. In this way, unlike corporate workers, we suggest that the freelance aesthetic labourer cannot walk away from their product, which is their entire embodied self. Thus, in these ways we see aesthetic labour adding to, or extending, rather than supplanting emotional labour, as would have it.
This essay was commissioned in 2010 by the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment in the U.K. as part of their project "People and Places: Public Attitudes To Beauty". Other material relating to this project is available on CABE's web archive at http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20110118095356/http://www.cabe.org.uk/publications/people-and-places
Until recently, beauty, fashion, and femininity have, for the most part, been overlooked by academia in spite of their sociocultural and political meaning, implications concerning power, role as instruments of modernity, and status as technologies of neoliberalism. Instead of recognizing the critical potential of these subjects, scholars have long disregarded them as irrelevant and frivolous.
Possessions and dispossession: homo economicus and neoliberal sociality in The Line of Beauty
Alan Hollinghurst’s novel The Line of Beauty (2004) is widely considered a contemporary masterpiece of realist social critique, taking aim at Britain’s rich and powerful under Thatcher’s Tory government and recollecting the twin traumas of Thatcherism and AIDS Crisis in the 1980s. Developing Simon During’s analysis of the novel as a sort of paradigmatic allegory of life under neoliberalism (2010; 2013), this paper examines BBC2’s three-part heritage adaptation of The Line of Beauty (2006) as a study more particularly of the conditions of intimacy and relationality under this emergent social order. The use of heritage screen conventions in the series situates the career of the novel’s Jamesian central consciousness, Nick Guest, amidst the material spaces and possessions of Thatcherite elites. Drawing from James’ vision of materialism in The Spoils of Poynton (1897), a key literary antecedent for Hollinghurst’s novel, the series’ semantically charged heritage mise-en-sce`nes and its stark depiction of the corporeal effects of HIV/AIDS enables it to portray both the perverse pleasures and the brutal material, human implications of a social world in which all associations, including friendship, love and kinship, are underwritten by the logic of ownership and the market.